Attending Church, purely to get to a certain school

[sleepydad3000]

They're aren't many things I feel so strongly about, but this issue is one of them. I am currently looking at schools for my daughter. I am a non religious person and my partner is a none practising Catholic, doesn't go to church at all anymore.

I personally think it's wrong on a moral level to exploit a church for 6 months or however long, just to get your child to a certain school. It's almost like, "Oh hi, yes thankyou, I've got what I needed, you'll never see me again!"

2 schools near me are both decent, 1 outstanding and 1 good (Ofsted ratings) interestingly enough, the NON Catholic school has the higher mark as of 2017.... just saying. Both schools are great in my view, religion aside. But I'd feel awful and wrong and like I was cheating or manipulating the system, just to get my girl to a certain school, and then waving bye bye to the church after, as I know for a fact, my partner and I have no intention of going to church afterwards.

But this all presupposes catholic (at least) schools would close if they weren’t allowed to discriminate on admissions. One would assume that if they offer a catholic education that their appeal would still be to majority catholic families. It’s a bit taking their ball back to suggest they would pack up altogether if they were asked to do away with their discriminatory admissions criteria isn’t it? And in any divorce settlement the person who has been paying for the upkeep of the property would be entitled to a share.

I think you are underestimating the Catholic Church, thelongestlurker, and what its mission (agenda) is.

My dc nursery is not in a bus either. It’s wholly outdoors, is rated outstanding, and there’s a long waiting list. I am not suggesting all schools should be wholly outdoors, just trying to prove that buildings are not the most important part of a school

Well perhaps, Maria, but then I am even more flabbergasted at the number of people on here defending the system as perfectly rational and coherent

No one is saying buildings are more important than other parts of a school. Buildings are, however, essential. Just as essential as teachers.

Well I have just told you that they are not, in fact, essential. Desirable maybe. And people were implying it with all that business about the church owning the school

longestlurkerforever - who is defending it as rational and coherent? Posters aren’t making a value judgement so much as describing why the system is as it is and is basically impossible to change. And not as terrible as all that, given the multipartite interests.

Of course school buildings are essential. A nursery is not a school.

Plenty of people were saying it’s be unfair to place conditions on state funding

Well it runs a school too, as it happens, though not a state school

Posters claimimg that it is unfair to place admissions restrictions on state funded schools are misunderstanding how faith schools are funded.

I am also not clear what’s hypocritical about any of this. One can be violently opposed to a system and still stuck with it.

Not sure that paying 5% of a school’s maintainance costs should buy much control over admissions procedures, frankly.....

MariaNovella hopefully you are not referring to me, as I have misunderstood nothing.

Faith schools are state funded. Voluntary Aided schools will be looking to find 10% of capital costs from outside of the state funding.

BertrandRussell - do you not think that the proprietor of a school should have some say in its governance?

If you look at the history of catholic schools they came along as catholic children couldn't not be educated and were discriminated against,

I was a single parent and first priest was having none of it when I took my DC to be baptised. Priest chaplain baptised immediately no classes etc. I'm a lapsed catholic.

I'm sick of people moaning about catholic's getting better schools. The selection through church attendance obviously weeds out the kids from homes with no discipline or morally bankrupt types on their revolving door of partners. Hence you tend to have an ethos closes to a private school than a local comp. They same selection goes for schools in middle class areas or grammar school selecting the most able children.

“do you not think that the proprietor of a school should have some say in its governance?“

I think that a Church that thinks it’s OK to reject a child living next door to a school in favour of another child living in the next village with all the social harms that creates is not a very Christian church. If the Christian ethos is so powerful a force for good it will shine through even without benefit of specially selected children.

I agree that one can be violently opposed to a system and still stuck with it. One can also, apparently, be violently opposed to an imaginary system and be very angry at the system as one imagines it, erroneously, to be. That second scenario seems a bit of a waste of emotional energy to me!

And if church schools are so much better simply because they are Church schools, A’s so many parents insist, they will be happy to reject backdoor selection because there will be no need for it.

BertrandRussell - you seem to believe that geographic selection is morally superior to faith based selection and should trump faith based selection even for church owned schools.

May I respectfully remind you that geographic selection has an awful lot of its own issues.

“May I respectfully remind you that geographic selection has an awful lot of its own issues.”
I agree. I am personally in favour of a combination of fair banding and lottery. But in the absence of that, geographic admission is the least worst.

You’re saying it again. The owner of a building who is reliant on significant investment from another source to actually run their enterprise, of which the building is not the primary element, is not really the proprietor of that enterprise. And anyway, no, in this country service providers are not allowed to discriminate against potential customers on the grounds of faith, unless they happen to be a church school, who are often in receipt of state funding, go figure. And I don’t know what imagined scenario you refer to .

Geographic admission in the absence of other criteria tends (the world over) to create highly socially stratified and segregated schools - wildly more so than faith based admission.

There are many other criteria you could use if you want to reduce social segregation. Replacing it with religious segregation is a bizarre route to choose.

The owner of a building who is reliant on significant investment from another source to actually run their enterprise, of which the building is not the primary element, is not really the proprietor of that enterprise.

No - they are still the proprietor. They share governance with other stakeholders but that does not change ownership.